September 01, 2015

Bernie Sanders has been drawing huge crowds to his rallies. The American media cannot ignore that. But they will never use the S word to describe Bernie even though that is how he describes himself. Bernie represents those who would tax Wall Street to preserve social security and a host of other common sense proposals. He dares to suggest that college should be free rather than the first stage of a life of indentured servitude and indebtedness.

People are listening - especially young people. Bernie has been saying these things for years but the media for the most part has been ignoring him. Now he has a bigger megaphone. His decision to run for President in order to get his message out there is paying off.

As Bernie himself has said: “the ideas and the points that we are making are reverberating very strongly with the American people.” Whoever would have thought that Bernie Sanders, Socialist, would be reverberating with the American people, the American people who love freedom and think that society should be set up in such a way that everybody has a chance, no matter how small, of getting rich?

On the other hand Bernie points out that social security is not in danger of running out of money. All you have to do is lift the cap and let rich people pay the same percentage of their income into it as do poor people. That is pretty reverberating if you can just get the message out. Bernie is getting the message out.

The media wants to call Bernie a "populist." Well, in this instance populism equals socialism. The notion that rich people should pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes as they did during the Eisenhauer administration, that there should be a tax on financial transactions and that taxes on the rich should support programs that aid the poor, is that populism or socialism, or both?

But then Americans have always been hypocritical about socialism. Even when they are enjoying the benefits from it, they don't want to acknowledge it. In an article in the New York Times, Socialism, American Style, Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M Hanna point out that socialism is a way of life in many American states including those that are considered "conservative." Only you can't call it that. That would not be politically correct.

Conservative Alaska is a Hotbed of Socialism

Take Alaska, for example. In this ultra conservative state there is a little socialist program known as The Alaska Permanent Fund. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established by a Republican governor in 1976, combines not one, but two socialist principles: public ownership and the provision of a basic income for all residents. The fund collects and invests proceeds from the extraction of oil and minerals in the state. Dividends are paid out annually to every man, woman and child in the state. Even Sarah Palin's family collects them.

Alaska is a land of rugged individualists - Republicans all the way. However, a little known fact is that Alaska taxes the oil and gas corporations operating there and distributes the proceeds on an annual basis equally among every man, woman and child living in the state. The biggest farce of all is that Tea Party touter, Governor Sarah Palin, slapped an excess profits tax on the state's oil companies in 2008, the year she ran for vice-President alongside John McCain, so that every person in Alaska received a dividend of $3269 that year. That was a pretty good haul for a family of four: $13,076. For Palin's family - husband Todd, sons Track and Trig and daughters Bristol, Willow and Piper - it came to an even better haul - $22,883!

We have also written about the Alaska Permanent Fund here. With global warming heating up the climate, more people will be moving to Alaska, not only in search of a moderate climate, but also to take advantage of the yearly stipend which might grow to the point that citizens of Alaska wouldn't have to work at all especially in view of the minerals that are becoming available due to the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Of course, that oil should stay in the ground if the earth has a chance of not warming up by 2 degrees C and causing widespread calamity.

Political correctness and hypocrisy demands that neither Palin nor any Republican politician mention the Alaska Permanent Fund nor any other socialist program from which money is taken from corporations and redistributed to the people. After all other states might get the idea that, if Alaska can do it, their state might be able to do the same thing. Well, in ultra conservative Texas, they've already figured that out: give lip service to conservative, rugged individualist principles while employing de facto socialist ones.

Texans Don't Mind Benefiting from a Socialist Policy

As Alperovitz and Hanna state:

Texas is another example of conservative socialism in practice. Almost 150 years ago the Texas Permanent School Fund took control of roughly half of all the land and associated mineral rights still in the public domain. In 1953, coastal “submerged lands” were added after being relinquished by the federal government. Each year distributions from the fund go to support education; in 2014 alone it gave $838.7 million to state schools. Another fund, the $17.5 billion Permanent University Fund, owns more than two million acres of land, the proceeds of which help underwrite the state’s public university system.

You'd think that Bernie Sanders would have plenty of supporters in Texas, namely all those who benefit from the Texas Permanent School Fund and Permanent University Fund, but instead they're all supporters of ultra conservative Governor Rick Perry, at least the majority consisting of white Texans are. Again lip service to conservatism while the actual reality they benefit from is socialism.

It's the same with Obamacare. All those southern conservatives who are benefiting from it love the reality while at the same time calling for its repeal. As a Washington Post article stated: "When the political history of the Affordable Care Act is written, Kentucky will occupy a special place in the tale. The implementation of the ACA there has helped produce the second steepest drop in the uninsured rate of any state. Yet even though that’s occurring in one of the most unhealthy regions in the country, the general idea of 'Obamacare' remains deeply unpopular."

Many countries employ the same principles, but without the hypocrisy. These funds are called sovereign wealth funds. Norway imposes a 50% tax on oil extraction which is put into its sovereign wealth fund which provides pensions and benefits for the Norwegian people. There's no talk there of "ending social security" because they don't have the money. Norwegians have plenty of money since they have profited from their co-owned public wealth in the form of oil extraction.

Only in America is there talk about the nonviability of social security. Most people don't even realize that if the rich paid into social security at the same rate as the poor, social security would be overfunded not underfunded and senior citizens could get a nice raise especially the needy ones.

The sovereign wealth fund in which Norway saves its oil-gas income is invested internationally primarily in stocks, bonds, and, starting recently, real estate. The strict primary goal is to save for future generations, when hydrocarbons run out. Investing abroad also helps to avoid overheating the Norwegian economy. In 2009, the fund advanced 34% to recover most of the bubble losses.The fund now owns more than 1% of the world’s shares in over 8000 companies. It is Europe’s biggest equity investor. Strategically, the fund takes a 30 year investment horizon. Thus, not surprisingly,the fund is currently investing aggressively in green industries. Helped by the past 30 year petroleum revenues that have been well-invested, Norway has become the 2nd richest nation per capita.

What if California Had Invested in a Sovereign Wealth Fund?

What if California would have taken control of its oil and gas revenues and invested in a sovereign wealth fund? There would be no budget problems today and there would be plenty of money to invest in infrastructure like desalination plants. California would have had the money to deal with its water shortage problems. Instead it became a debt based economy owing what amounts to a mortgage to Wall Street.

Another example: The Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund, with a market value of more than $7 billion accumulated from mineral extraction, has helped to eliminate income taxes in the state. The basic principle is that the mineral resources of the state belong to the citizens of that state not some private corporation. The idea is that the state should endeavor to enter into a relationship that adequately compensates the citizens for the extraction of their property.

One of the largest “socialist” enterprises in the nation is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a publicly owned company with $11 billion in sales revenue, nine million customers and 11,260 employees that produces electricity and helps manage the Tennessee River system. It seems that some socialist enterprises are not only very successful but are also very popular with the citizens who collectively profit from such enterprises.

Another example is publicly owned utilities. There are, in fact, already more than 2,000 publicly owned electric utilities that, along with cooperatives, supply more than 25 percent of the country’s electricity, now operating throughout the United States. In one of the most conservative states, Nebraska, every single resident and business receives electricity from publicly owned utilities, cooperatives or public power districts. Partly as a result, Nebraskans pay one of the lowest rates for electricity in the nation.

Perhaps the best example of public ownership or socialism, if you will, is the Public Bank of North Dakota (BND). Instead of shipping money to Wall Street, North Dakota uses the profits from its state owned bank to reduce taxes, invest in infrastructure and provide reasonable student loans. Many cities, counties and states are waking up to the fact that the profits that have heretofore been reaped by Wall Street from operations in their states should instead be reinvested in the state or public entity itself. The BND is serving as an example for them to follow. Private profit that goes into out of state investors' pockets is replaced by public profit which benefits citizens locally whether in a state or a city or other public entity.

The American People Should Derive Part of their Income From Public Wealth

As I said in the aforementioned article: Rich people live off of dividends, rent or interest paid to them in one form or other from their accumulated wealth. Public wealth is owned by the citizens of the US collectively. To receive a dividend from their co-owned wealth would tend to ameliorate the growing inequality of wealth ownership in the US and supplement poor and middle class incomes. Every citizen should be in a position of deriving at least a part of their income from co-owned wealth, especially since income from jobs is going downhill due to automation and outsourcing. This would eliminate poverty, provide a basic income guarantee, stimulate the economic system from the bottom up and restore the middle class.

The US is a debt based country which by virtue of the dollar's place as the world's reserve currency can continue to go into debt. Most other countries don't have this luxury so they start sovereign wealth funds which invest in American debt among other things so that their citizens are in the position of being investors while American citizens are essentially debtors for whom the chickens have not yet come home to roost.

Bernie Sanders' message is starting to make good sense to thousands of American people who are fed up with the BS Republicans have been feeding them. They are listening to Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, the Pope and the Dalai Lama and beginning to take seriously the facts of climate change, free public education up to the university level, Medicare for all and a beefed up social security program. Ownership of wealth and assets should not be only for the rich. Socialism provides that public wealth shall be redistributed to the poor and middle class as well.

December 08, 2012

Why hire individual lobbyists and send them out in search of Congressmen when you can set up a lobbying clearinghouse and have them come to you? ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, does just that. Funded by the likes of the Koch brothers, Exxon Mobil and PhRMA, a trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, legislators are paid to come to ALEC meetings, where they are wined, dined, and handed "model" legislation to make into law in their state. Through ALEC, corporations vote on "model" legislation alongside politicians behind closed doors. So instead of the lobbyists fanning out on Capitol Hill to meet with Congressmen individually, public officials are invited en masse to an ALEC meeting off Capitol Hill at a fancy resort, and they had better be there or be square if they want a campaign contribution or a great job when their "public service" career comes to an end.

Foundations controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers gave ALEC over $200,000 in 2009. And that's in addition to the undisclosed amount paid in membership dues by Koch Industries. The Koch foundations have given ALEC at least $600,000 in the past decade or so, and Koch Industries has donated an untold amount. There are also a number of other right wing moneybags contributing to ALEC. The Castle Rock Foundation, which is run by right wing beer heir Peter Coors and the right wing John M. Olin Foundation have also been donors to ALEC. Another of the big right wing foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, has been a funder as well as right winger Richard Scaife.

ALEC brings legislators and their families, rich indivduals and corporations together at luxury resorts. For a few hours of work on a task force and a couple of indoctrination sessions by ALEC experts, part-time legislators can bring the whole family to ALEC’s annual convention, work for a few hours, then stay in swank hotels, attend cool parties and raise funds for the campaign coffer, all heavily subsidized by the corporate till. In 2009, ALEC spent $251,873 on childcare so Mom and Dad could have fun. The legislators from all levels - local, state and national - are then handed model legislation which the legislators then take back home to their districts where they present it as having been crafted by themselves instead of by corporate lawyers. ALEC makes old-fashioned lobbying obsolete. Once legislators return to their state with corporate-sponsored ALEC legislation in hand, the legislators themselves become “super-lobbyists” for ALEC’s corporate agenda, cutting out the middleman. The fusion of politician and lobbyist is complete.

A lot of this legislation then gets passed in states that are controlled by Republican governors and legislators. For instance, in Michigan the legislature just passed a so-called right-to-work law which basically defunds unions. Right to work laws ban mandatory union dues. Unions are one of the biggest funders of Democrats so taking money away from union coffers essentially helps more Republicans get elected.

In Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker tried to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights. After much ballyhoo and a recall election, Walker was able to retain his position although much of his union busting efforts were struck down by a state judge. To give you some idea of the influence that ALEC has in Wisconsin read the following:

21 of these bills or budget provisions have passed, and two were vetoed;

More than $276,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC legislators in Wisconsin from ALEC corporations since 2008;

More than $406,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC alumnus Governor Walker from ALEC corporations over the same time period for his state campaign account;

At least 49 current Wisconsin legislators are known ALEC members, including the leaders of both the House and Senate as well as other legislators holding key posts in the state. Additionally, the Governor, the Secretary of the Department of Administration, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission are ALEC alumni; and

At least 17 current legislators have received thousands of dollars of gifts cumulatively from ALEC corporations in the past few years, in the form of flights and hotel rooms filtered through the ALEC “scholarship fund” (complete “scholarship” information is not available).

ALEC’s 2010 annual meeting was held in San Diego at the Manchester Grand Hyatt resort. In California the main ALEC affiliate is the State Policy Network of which the San Diego Institute for Policy Research founded by Steve Francis is a member. Francis unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2005 as a fiscal conservative against former San Diego Chief of Police Jerry Sanders and Councilwoman Donna Frye. Francis ran again in 2008 against incumbent Jerry Sanders. The San Diego Institute for Policy Research (which now resides at National University) is an ALEC affiliate, according to Daily Kos and generates economic and policy research with regard to the San Diego region. Francis serves on the Board of Advisors for the Institute.

San Diego just escaped an ALEC invasion when Bob Filner beat Carl DeMaio for mayor. According to Jim Miller:

"[The Center on Policy Initiatives report, 'Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government' by Lee Cokorinos] carefully documents the intricate web of connections between the corporate-funded think tanks at the national, state and local level. Some of the key organizations include the aforementioned Americans for Tax Reform, Freedom Works and the American Legislative Exchange Council at the national level; the Project for California's Future, the Pacific Research Institute, the Claremont Institute and the Reason Foundation at the state level; and the Performance Institute [founded by Carl DeMaio] here in San Diego."

Miller goes on:

"In California, privatization advocates at think tanks like the Pacific Research Institute and the Claremont Institute argue that, according to Cokorinos, "a key political objective for the right wing is to compel states and localities to compete with one another in a frenzy of deregulation and privatization that will supposedly attract investment…. Taken to its extreme, this would involve a race to the bottom, where perfect efficiency equals no regulation, and the perfect state is a minimal government that simply secures the sanctity of contracts and provides for the common defense."

"In addition to the work being done at the Pacific Research and Claremont institutes, the Reason Foundation cranks out an endless flow of pro-privatization propaganda aimed at lambasting the incurably wasteful inefficiency of government in contrast to the flawless productivity of market forces. Through the use of "performance reviews," which inevitably show how government just doesn't work like the business world, the idea of "performance-based government" is promoted as the final solution for the hapless public sector, which just needs to be put to sleep.

"As Cokorinos observes, "the performance review, while long a part of organizational culture public and private, is used [in Reason Foundation reports] as a non-threatening entry point to achieve an ideological purpose" to identify inefficiencies that require the expertise of right-wing think-tank experts to be solved. DeMaio, in his time at Reason, and others after him have promoted a radical privatization agenda by releasing annual "privatization reports" that have advocated the privatization of military housing, education, transportation systems, public roads and highways, housing, major infrastructure projects and much more.

"DeMaio founded the Performance Institute in 2001 and set about bringing to San Diego the skills he learned at Reason and while working to starve the beast in the Beltway with Newt Gingrich at the Congressional Institute. The conservative old guard in San Diego seemed to be in peril, with labor, environmental activists and other progressives gaining new political clout. Democrats controlled the City Council for the first time in the history of the city, and a significant political realignment seemed possible."

It's clear San Diego barely escaped an extreme right wing radical who would have privatized city government and made San Diego a model of what ALEC is trying to accomplish throughout the US.

For some time legislation has not been written by elected officials but by lobbyists and presented to elected officials who then get it enacted into law if they have the votes on their side. In the election of 2010 Republicans swept into power at the state level particularly in states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida. In all Republicans control 27 state legislatures and Democrats control 19. A lot of the right wing action, therefore, is at the state level. High on their agenda is privatization. Publicly owned assets are put up for sale. Government provided services are outsourced to private corporations. Public schools are replaced by charter schools. In the last few years, the Michigan state government has engaged in several privatization efforts. In 1992 the governor issued an executive order creating the Michigan Public-Private Partnership Commission and charged it with analyzing ways in which state services can be provided more efficiently by "introducing competition into the public sector." The commission encouraged the various departments to review each activity and every program in state government to find candidates for potential privatization.

ALEC members represent a who's who of right wing politicians and major corporations. The organization has 2000 legislative members and over 300 corporate members. Corporations not legislators fund almost all of ALEC's activities. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. The long-term representation of Koch Industries on the governing board means that Koch has had influence over an untold number of ALEC bills.

March 14, 2012

When I was a graduate student at UCSD in the midst of the anti-war movement, protesting the war in Vietnam, I went to the library and pondered what would make the world a better place, what could I do to contribute something that might make war less likely and peace time activity more likely. I concluded that more cooperation was needed. More ways to resolve conflicts big and small. For example, democratic voting systems resolve conflicts in such a way that solutions are found that are acceptable to all parties for the most part. I took it for granted that institutions that provided for more cooperation and less competition were more desirable. I thought that this was what the Enlightenment was all about. My heroes were the Enlightenment superstars: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, John Locke.

As I sat there and went through the stacks, I discovered another field and another set of superstars. Social choice has a long history going back to the French Enlightenment philosophers, the Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda, and even further back than that. One of the 19th century superstars in this field was none other than the Rev. C. L. Dodgson otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. These guys came up with voting systems which are essential to democracy and are essential to the whole notion of cooperation and conflict resolution. The most recent work in this field was by Kenneth Arrow who published a book Social Choice and Individual Valuesin the 1950s which attempted to generalize conflict resolution in society in both the political and economic spheres. Arrow concluded that this was impossible and came up with his famous Impossibility Theorem which was a generalization using sophisticated mathematics of the paradox of voting that was known to Condorcet hundreds of years ago. Therefore, Arrow concluded democracy was impossible and any economic system other than capitalism was impossible too. Hmmm, I thought, this is obviously a cop-out because some political and economic systems are more desirable than others and Arrow has done nothing except to throw cold water on any framework that could consider these. I took it as my self-assigned task to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is possible. My work can be found on the website Social Choice and Beyond.

In “Social Choice and Individual Values,” Kenneth Arrow said , “In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions.” This paper resolves that dichotomy by developing a meta-theory from which can be derived methods for both political and economic decision making. This theory overcomes Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in which he postulates that social choice is impossible and compensates for strategic voting, an undesirable aspect of decision making according to Gibbard and Satterthwaite. Thus the politonomics meta-theory spawns both political and economic systems which are indeed possible and which cannot be gamed. In a typical voting system the outcome of an election among several candidates results in one realized outcome – the winner of the election - which applies to all voters. In a typical economic system, a consumer may choose among a variety of possible baskets of consumer items and work programs with the result that multiple realized outcomes are possible with a unique or quasi-unique outcome for each worker/consumer. As the number of possible realized outcomes of a political-economic decision making process increases, the process becomes more economic and less political in nature and vice versa. We show that as the number of possible realized outcomes increases, voter/consumer/worker satisfaction or utility increases both individually and collectively.

I never considered, as I sat there pondering, that there would be people who would argue that what the world needed was not more cooperation but more competition, but, as I sit here today, I realize that the whole conservative right wing is in favor of just that. They want not more cooperation in either the political or economic realm but more competition believing that only winners should prevail and human progress is only possible when you give free reign to those among us who are the most talented, intelligent and ambitious. They believe that competition will result in the strongest among us winning just as Nietzsche believed that a good war hallows every cause. Their ethic is that the naturally gifted elite should prevail, and they are not concerned about what happens to the rest of us or of who is trampled in the process. This is also the philosophy of Ayn Rand as espoused in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

The debate today about increasing inequality in the world has to do with the prevalent conservative belief that only the strong should survive and be promoted and that freedom should preclude equality as a value. The rich should get more tax breaks because they are the true instigators of human progress and should be catered to at every turn. Perhaps a few crumbs will trickle down to the rest of us. This kind of thinking is counter to the Enlightenment and is fast returning us to a neo-Dark Age. No more is human progress to be measured in reduction of poverty and extension of basic services like health care to everyone. It is to be measured in terms of the great advances to human civilization like iPads, iPods and iPhones. People who are capable of coming up with these advances should be cut every break and none of the billions of dollars they make should be transferred by government to the least of these among us like the homeless, the poverty-stricken and the destitute because, well, they are the least among us, not the best among us who should be given every break.

Nevertheless, I remain in the camp of those who think that more cooperation in the political and economic spheres will do more for human progress than more competititon. I also have spent about 40 years in my spare time trying to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is not impossible and that democracy in both the political and economic spheres is not only possible but desirable. This has a lot to do with voting systems, democratic institutions and constitutions but also with cooperative economic systems in which freedom is seen not as the freedom to make money at other people's expense (the losers in the competitive struggle) but the freedom to work as much or as little as one chooses and in accordance with one's preferences as much as possible. Freedom from work is for many people just as desirable a goal as the freedom to make billions of dollars, and wealthy people who don't have to work would be the first to tell you that. Economic democracy in my view is more desirable than cutthroat capitalism, and can be practiced not only at the national level, but at the enterprise level in the form of co-ops like the Mondragon Corporation.

Marx's famous definition of the "good society" was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This of course was perverted in defining communism as a society where all the wealth created by those who had a lot of talent and ability as well as a strong work ethic combined with those who had not so much in those categories would be thrown into a pot and then divided up in equal portions and handed out by the government. Such need not be the case in achieving the "good society." The "needs" part is pretty basic and could probably be accomplished with abouit 10% of the wealth that exists in the world today. Most people can provide for their own needs - no transfer necessary. There are some who cannot and to transfer a small part of the wealth of the wealthy to provide for their basic needs seems to me to be no more than humane. That still leaves the vast amount of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. In other words if you total up how much it would cost to provide for all the basic needs of everyone in the world and tote up how much wealth there exists in the world, it would take a fraction of all that wealth to provide the basic needs for everyone who cannot provide for their basic needs themselves who turn out to be mainly children, seniors and handicapped (whether physically or mentally) people.

A recent documentary by German TV station Deutsche Welle pointed out that half the world's production of food is wasted because super markets only want perfect vegetables and ones with slight blemishes are thrown out even though they are perfectly edible. Shelves need to be fully stocked with bread right up till closing hours even though any bread left over at the end of day will be thrown out as "day old." All the food that is thrown out by advanced nations is enough to feed all the world's hungry three times over although no governments or other institutions, much less the supermarkets themselves, seem to be interested in organizing that effort. This is what I mean by the fact that the basic needs of all the world's people could be satisfied without subtracting much if anything from the world's wealthy although a lot of them would admit they do not need incomes of millions of dollars a day like the Fortune 400 billionaires have.

Another documentary noted that Finnish school children have the highest test scores in the world despite the fact that they have one of the world's shortest school days with 15 minutes intermissions between classes during which time they are encouraged to go outdoors and play. All grades have large amounts of music, art and self-defined projects. They don't teach to the test. They are concerned with the development of each student as an overall human being not just as some super competitive cog in a nationally competitive machine. The Chinese on the other hand have the opposite approach demanding that children learn by rote methods and extra hours in school and at study. The Finnish schools are all public and everyone is accepted into every class. There are no advanced classes or tracking of students into lesser classes if they are not among the elite intellectually. Everyone is thrown in together; yet they have the best outcomes of any country in the world on standardized international tests. Egalitariansim seems to gain the best results.

An egalitarian ethic in which the concern is for the development of the whole human being rather than a promotion of just those who have superior abilities in accordance with a competitive ethic seems to me to be the most humanitarian way to treat both children and adults. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights already provides for most of the "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" ethic. It calls for free health care which most advanced socierties, with the exception of the United States, already provide. It calls for free education and other public institutions and covers most basic human needs including food and shelter.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

All the basic needs of everyone on the planet could be provided for without subtracting much of the wealth of the rich since most people can provide for at least their basic needs without any transfer of wealth whatsover being necessary. Interestingly, the US among other nations does provide food security for the poor through its food stamps program. And of course seniors are provided for through Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, programs which conservative free marketers are anxious to change or eliminate.

I am with the Enlightenment thinkers especially the English utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who thought about the happiness of society as a whole and concluded that everyone counted, not only the ones with exceptional talent, ability and other admirable qualities. A society should be judged by how it treats "the least of these my brethren" which is the core and essence of Jesus' teachings but, sad to say, not the core and essence of Christianity as it exists in the world today. Perhaps we should start thinking about an alternative constitution for the US which has the world's oldest constitution (236 years old!) while being the world's youngest advanced nation. Other societies including most European societies while being older than the US have newer constitutions. As far-sighted as the Founding Fathers were, a new and updated constitution incorporating not only political but also economic rights along the lines of the UN Declaration of Human Rights would do much to right the wrongs and shortcomings of present day America and the world.

February 29, 2012

Republican politicians are in the habit of assailing President Obama with statements like the following: "I believe that President Obama is the worst President in American history." Really? Based on what facts? Was he worse than Willard Fillmore? Was he worse than Franklin Pierce? Was he worse then James Buchanan? According to every poll including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, C-SPAN and Sienna College, these Presidents are considered the worst. But never mind that. What Republican politicians and right wing talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and other right wingers do is to create an alternative reality based not on facts but on beliefs. They've constructed a completely fictitious alternative Barack Obama, one that is worthy of being detested and ridiculed and demeaned. Then their job is to sell that image of Barack Obama to the American public. The American public, most of them, have never met Barack Obama. They've never discussed politics, economics or anything else with Barack Obama. Their only knowledge of Barack Obama is whatever comes over the TV tube. So competing realities are out their for defining and either demonizing or angelizing Barack Obama. According to this view of reality, the side with the most TV and media output wins. Republican politicians and TV and talking head radio personalities are mostly either lawyers or people like lawyers with immense powers to persuade and convince people of practically anything. A good lawyer can convince a jury that an innocent man is guilty or that a guilty man is innocent. That is their job, and the better that the lawyer can distort the truth, the better lawyer he or she is considered to be.

When it comes to politics, the more right wing talking heads can convince people that Barack Obama is the worst President ever, the more money they make. The whole point is to demonize Obama by associating him with Muslims or Kenyans or the devil. They don't quite go so far as to associate him with Hitler. That seems to be one line even the lunatic fringe will not cross. But they tell you he is a European socialist despite the fact that he went all out to save the big banks, the very beating heart of capitalism, from complete collapse in the recent financial calamity. Despite the fact that not one fraudulent banker is in jail, Obama is a socialist. Too bad the Soviet Union no longer exists or they would be tagging Obama with the communist label. So now they are reduced in effect to accusing him of being sympathetic to the European Union! Gorbachev said that the collapse of the Soviet Union would deprive the US of its enemy. How right he was? The US was deprived of its chief bogeyman when the Soviet Union imploded. And they cannot very well demonize The Communist Party of China, our chief trading partner and financial co-dependent. So they are reduced to accusing Obama of being a European socialist.

The dynamic here is to demonize Obama based on beliefs not facts. And they have a lot of money to do it with. In many media markets there are no countervailing views. People are left to the imprecations of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. So they hear day in and day out that Obama is A TERRIBLE PRESIDENT, the worst President etc. Knowledgable persons whose voices are hardly consulted might say that Obama's predecessor, George W Bush, was among the worst.

A 2006 Siena College poll of 744 professors reported the following results:

"George W. Bush has just finished five years as President. If today were the last day of his presidency, how would you rank him? The responses were: Great: 2%; Near Great: 5%; Average: 11%; Below Average: 24%; Failure: 58%."

"In your judgment, do you think he has a realistic chance of improving his rating?” Two-thirds (67%) responded no; less than a quarter (23%) responded yes; and 10% chose no opinion or not applicable."

Thomas Kelly, professor emeritus of American studies at Siena College, said: "President Bush would seem to have small hope for high marks from the current generation of practicing historians and political scientists. In this case, current public opinion polls actually seem to cut the President more slack than the experts do." Dr. Douglas Lonnstrom, Siena College professor of statistics and director of the Siena Research Institute, stated: "In our 2002 presidential rating, with a group of experts comparable to this current poll, President Bush ranked 23rd of 42 presidents. That was shortly after 9/11. Clearly, the professors do not think things have gone well for him in the past few years. These are the experts that teach college students today and will write the history of this era tomorrow."

A 2010 Siena poll of 238 Presidential scholars found that former president George W. Bush was ranked 39th out of 43, with poor ratings in handling of the economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence. Meanwhile, the current president, Barack Obama was ranked 15th out of 43, with high ratings for imagination, communication ability and intelligence and a low rating for background (family, education and experience).

Bush doubled the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion by giving tax cuts to the rich, an unfunded prescription drug benefit to seniors which was a giveaway to the pharmaceutical corporations and two unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama took out the leadership of Al Quaeda including Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, brought or is bringing those unfortunate wars to an end and is doing his best to restore Clinton's tax structure which would raise taxes on the rich while keeping tax cuts for the middle class and poor. Obama's health care act, popularly known as Obamacare, would, among other things, end the insurance corporations' policy of rescission which denies insurance to people with pre-exisitng conditions, close the doughnut hole for seniors and keep young people on their parents' policies till age 26, an important consideration in an era of high youth unemployment. The fact is that Bush Jr was cavalier in implementing policies that were not only disastrous for the US including the war he lied us into in Iraq, but also ran up the national debt in a huge way. These policies are still in effect because of Republican filibusters that keep them in effect. Only now Obama is being blamed for them by the right wing talking heads, and using their powers of persuasion, they are doing their best to convince the American people that Obama is a spenthrift who only wants bigger government despite the fact that there have been massive job losses in the public sector and modest gains in the private sector.

So the fictitious President Obama is what Santorum, Romney, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Hannity and all the rest are trying to sell to the US public. They are fueled with billions of dollars from right wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson for whom a million or two invested here or there is nothing more than pocket change. With an income of $1 billion a year, which translates to $1000 million a year or $2.7 million a day, these guys can well afford a day's pay to influence elections in their favor. That's pocket change to them. So they associate Obama with Satan. He's supposed to be in league with the devil. They send around emails showing a skunk, half black and half white, and associate that with Obama. There's no depth that they won't sink to to demonize Obama except of course they haven't sunk to the depth of trying to convince us that he's channeling Adolf Hitler. I guess Hitler's considered to be even worse than the devil! And of couse all this is based on statements like "I think that Obama blah blah..." and "I believe that Obama blah blah ...." Nothing based on facts because the facts are quite the opposite of the image they are trying to create

And the truth is that they don't give a rip about all the stuff they try to get the electorate riled up about like the social issues - abortion, birth control, God, gays and guns. These are all smoke screens to hide their real agenda which is tax breaks for the rich, deregulation for corporations and privatization of public schools. Of course they never talk about inequality or the fact that corporations only contribute 8% of Federal revenues instead of the 30% they used to contribute. They don't talk about the fact that the rich pay taxes at a lower rate than the poor. The last thing they want to talk about is the fact that there is $2.5 trillion in the social security trust fund because they want to eliminate social security on the grounds that it is running out of money.

So Obama is terrible, a failure (they love that tag), the worst President in American history based on not facts but beliefs. Except that these intelligent men don't really believe that at all. Just like the lawyer that knows his client is guilty and effectively and skillfully convinces the jury that he really is innocent, right wing talking heads including Republican politicians are trying to draw a picture of Obama as the worst President in American history and then convince you that this belief based reality is the real reality.

February 03, 2012

There's not much that comes out of conservative mouths these days that I find agreeable. However, Republican Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels, in his rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union Speech, mentioned an idea for saving the government money which I heartedly (I won't say whole- heartedly) endorse. He said:

"There is a second item on our national must-do list: we must unite to save the safety net. Medicare and Social Security have served us well, and that must continue. But after half and three quarters of a century respectively, it’s not surprising that they need some repairs. We can preserve them unchanged and untouched for those now in or near retirement, but we must fashion a new, affordable safety net so future Americans are protected, too.

“Decades ago, for instance, we could afford to send millionaires pension checks and pay medical bills for even the wealthiest among us. Now, we can’t, so the dollars we have should be devoted to those who need them most. [ed. note: Amen!]

...

"It’s absolutely so that everyone should contribute to our national recovery, including of course the most affluent among us. ... The better course is to stop sending the wealthy benefits they do not need, and stop providing them so many tax preferences that distort our economy and do little or nothing to foster growth."

First I should add that there is $2.5 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund so it is not exactly in dire need of reform and also eliminating the cap on income on which people pay Social Security and Medicare taxes will bring in additional money. Medicare, on the other hand, is in dire need of reform, but increasing the amount on which the rich pay into the system in Medicare taxes will help to fix that.

But why do liberals, like Thom Hartmann, disagree with the sentiment "to stop sending the wealthy benefits they do not need"? By Hartmann's convoluted logic we must continue to make payments to the rich just so they won't eliminate payments to the poor and middle class. Thom Hartmann says that this would be the "camel's nose under the tent" for those who want to destroy Social Security and Medicare. His logic is the same as those who say we must give tax breaks to big corporations just so they will continue to provide jobs. Means testing according to him will give Republicans all the leeway they need to eliminate Social Security and Medicare altogether. Bullshit! They don't need the pretext of "means testing" to accomplish that. Hartmann doesn't realize that all social programs in the US are under attack by the right wing and the only thing standing in the way of their entire elimination is the determination of the middle class and Democratic politicians to fight for their continuance and even expansion.

So liberals will resist even a rational idea for reform because it might lead to the complete destruction of these venerable programs? Let me tell you something. Their nose is already under the tent. They don't need this pretext for wanting to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Why they have already boldly proposed privatizing both of these programs. Check out Paul Ryan's plan, "The Path to Prosperity" (for the rich). For liberals or progressives to oppose a rational idea just because it comes from someone that I for one disagree with on everything else he is trying to do, like destroying unions in the state of Indiana, is utter irrational nonsense. It goes under the same principal of not giving subsidies and tax breaks to highly profitable corporations like the oil companies.

President Obama is proposing an alternative minimum tax for millionaires. Why not apply this alternative minimum tax to corporations? Why should Exxon and GE actually get back taxpayer dollars and pay absolutely nothing in? There should be an alternative minimum tax for them too. By the same token senior citizens who have retirement incomes in the $100,000. range or higher don't need another $1000. a month in social security benefits. The money would be better spent by giving it to people whose only retirement income is social security and whose social security income places them below the poverty line. If you are getting $10,000. a month in retirement income, you don't need another $1000. a month in Social Security. It's absolutely ridiculous. By the same token, you don't need Medicare either. You're perfectly capable of buying a gold plated private health insurance policy which the rich would probably do anyway since the finest doctors (unfortunately) do not even accept Medicare patients.

To take a truly conservative approach to government spending is to make everyone (including corporations which according to the Supreme Court are people) pay their fair share and to not receive government benefits which they don't deserve. By definition they don't deserve government benefits if they are fantastically wealthy in the first place although the rich have hired lobbyists whose main goal is to provide them with government benefits at the expense of the poor and middle class. This has turned the goal of reducing government spending on its head. According to them (in defiance of the hypocritical words that come out of their mouths) there is no government spending so large that goes to the wealthy that should be eliminated. Their goal is to shower government benefits on the rich while denying them to the poor. That's why there is so much inequality in the US - because they have been actively promoting it regardless of the hypocritical words they say. They are only for reducing the size of government when it comes to reducing government programs and subsidies which benefit the poor and middle class.

The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation's wealth. The bottom 80% own 7%. The top 1% take home 24% of the nation's income. In 1976 they took home just 9%. Their share of national income has almost tripled in just over 30 years. How was this accomplished? Not by hard work, but by incessant lobbying to change laws that benefit the rich like the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that overthrew Glass-Steagall leading to the merger of commercial and investment banks, unregulated derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and all the other paraphernalia of the financialization and globalization of the US economy. Leveraged buyout artists or vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney can give $100,000,000. to each of his five sons without paying any gift tax while ordinary middle class folks pay taxes through the nose. On Romney's income of $21 million last year, for which he did no work to earn it, he paid less than 14% in taxes while most middle class folks are taxed in the 30% range. Romney also paid practically nothing in Social Security or FICA taxes. If he had paid FICA taxes on all his income, this would have helped to bail out Social Security and Medicare right there.

Capital gains is how the rich make their money and they are taxed right now at half the rate that the middle class is taxed. Here is the history:

In the 1970s under President Carter capital gains were taxed at 40%. In the 1980s under President Reagan they were lowered to 20% and under George W Bush they were lowered to 15%. All this was done under the noses of the middle class while they were sleeping or watching football on television. What me worry? Meanwhile lobbyists for the rich were hard and persistently at work. It's pretty clear that Democratic Presidents have raised capital gains taxes while Republican Presidents have lowered them.

A true conservative would want to conserve the safety net while insuring that the rich pay their fair share. Instead all they talk about is lowering taxes (primarily on the rich) while eliminating government programs which primarily benefit the poor and middle class. If they want to reduce the size of government a good place to start would be to reduce the size of the bloated military-industrial complex. Presdident Obama is already striking a populist tone with his talk about an "alternative minimum tax" on millionaires while Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is busy ending wars and reducing the size of the military-industrial complex. They should follow up by embracing Social Security and Medicare reform and by reducing or eliminating payouts of all kinds to the rich. They should also enact a Financial Transactions Tax to be used for debt reduction so that the banks can pay back their fair share to the taxpayers who bailed them out.

October 22, 2011

Print media’s decline in the United States can be tracked in microcosm in San Diego, longtime home to one of the country’s most conservative, reactionary dailies.

Local progressives have been watching in bemusement for several years as The San Diego Union-Tribune – once Richard Nixon’s favorite news source – radically chops staff, loses circulation and, more importantly, sees its once-dominant and domineering position as a right-wing political and cultural force in the area fade.

The fall of the U-T, which some newsroom insiders believe is heading for its last press run, would mirror the predicament of other major U.S. dailies long confronted by the ubiquitous Internet and similar burgeoning alternative media, as well as by a dwindling passion for reading among the young.

“My guess is, (the U-T) is barely breaking even, if that,” said a veteran staffer. “Everybody here is looking over their shoulder.”

The turbulence at the U-T commenced in 2006 when the paper announced the first of what would be seven rounds of layoffs and buyouts of newsroom, circulation and other staff (even the cafeteria closed).

Three years later, publisher David Copley, whose rabidly conservative family had monopolized the local newspaper industry and dominated the city’s civic affairs for decades, sold the business to Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills-based private equity group.

However, Platinum’s involvement has hardly cut the flow of red ink. Daily circulation has dipped in the past three years from 242,705 to 218,614, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Efforts by Platinum to attract subscribers with a hyper-local emphasis in its news columns have failed to draw readers’ interest, as have circulation promotions which essentially give the paper away. (A U-T booth at a recent home improvement show at the local convention center, for instance, offered new subscribers $10 worth of free Starbucks gift cards for a $10-a-month sub.)

Some observers nevertheless think that Platinum’s plans for the U-T have little to do with keeping it in the black, or even in print.

Indeed, Platinum announced in July that it had hired the investment banking advisory firm Evercare Partners to examine “strategic alternatives” for the U-T – code words to some for finding a buyer.

It would all seem to be business as usual for Platinum, which owns more than 100 companies in such sectors as infotech, telecommunications and real estate. Platinum’s annual aggregate revenue from these firms is $27 billion or so.

The company has a reputation for acquiring distressed properties like the U-T at bargain rates, then quickly turning them around for sale at a tidy profit.

Murdoch’s interest in the U-T seems unlikely, however, since he would face a recalcitrant News Corp. board still fuming over this summer’s newspaper hacking scandal in the United Kingdom. The board would also seemingly balk at extending the company’s already substantial involvement in the shrinking newspaper industry, however enthusiastic Murdoch might be for supplementing his print portfolio.

Still other speculation has the paper eventually merging with various large regional newspaper properties (the Orange County Register, even the Los Angeles Times) to form one pervasive Southern California daily.

Such a consolidation could be operated with a fraction of current newsroom staffs and costs.

But at least one U-T editor thinks Platinum will instead soon simply stop printing the paper altogether – “it’s essentially worthless now,” the editor said – and sell the real estate on which the paper’s editorial offices and printing press are situated in the lush commercial hub of San Diego’s Mission Valley.

The editor noted that Platinum paid between $40 million and $50 million for virtually all of the U-T’s assets in the 2009 deal, even though the U-T’s headquarters alone reportedly sits on land assessed at about $90 million.

Progressives seemingly would hail the demise of the once-pervasive U-T, which for years has maintained a stridently right-wing sensibility in its opinion pages and news columns alike.

Among the lowlights:

- Well into the 1970s, U-T publisher James Copley routinely lent his political writers gratis to the successful mayoral, gubernatorial and senate campaigns of Pete Wilson, as well as numerous other Republican politicos. The late Herbert Klein, for example, worked alternately for years as an editor at the newspaper and a mouthpiece for GOP candidates, all the while collecting a Copley paycheck. Klein ultimately served as communications director for Nixon, who often referred to the Union as his favorite newspaper.

- In the late-1960s, a memo issued from the publisher’s office advised editors to avoid running photos of black people on section fronts. The policy remained in force, if unofficially, into the mid-1970s.

- During the same period, The San Diego Union (which later merged with its sister publication the Evening Tribune to form the Union-Tribune) targeted the late Marxist philosophy professor Herbert Marcuse in conjunction with threats and harassment by the Secret Army Organization, a militant right-wing vigilante group made up of San Diego Police officers and military veterans. Marcuse, who was teaching at UC San Diego at the time, often was wrongly characterized in Union news columns and editorial cartoons as a dangerous Soviet agent promoting violent revolution in the U.S. Union executives routinely bragged that the Marcuse campaign was designed to run him out of town, if not kill him.

- The vending machines of alternative newspapers like the O.B. Rag, the San Diego Door and the San Diego Free Press were routinely plucked off the streets by Union circulation drivers in the late-1960s at the behest of Victor Krulak, an executive in the U-T publishing office. (Krulak had earlier served as President John Kennedy’s counterinsurgency expert in Vietnam.)

Through it all, the newspaper used its news columns to pimp for conservative candidates and issues near to the heart of the Copley family, while downplaying or completely ignoring alternative progressive voices.

This stifling pro-business, pro-military stance has hardly diminished in the new century.

For instance, the U-T unwaveringly backed the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, including giving ad nauseum support for George W. Bush’s premise that Iraq was a repository for so-called weapons of mass destruction.

The intimate nature of the long Copley-GOP relationship could until recently be seen in the U-T executive offices, where a large photograph of David Copley, former editor Karin Winner and Bush – all three of them in the throes of laughter – had been prominently displayed for years.

A cursory read of Thursday’s U-T indicates that little has changed under Platinum’s stewardship.

The op-ed page features a Q&A with Mayor Jerry Sanders and other business leaders griping about how difficult it has been to find money to build a new football stadium for the Chargers, while the lead piece in the local section trumpets the police union’s endorsement of Republican newcomer Nathan Fletcher against liberal Democrat Bob Filner in the local mayoral race.

Of course, all of this debate about the U-T’s pernicious influence through the years may soon be relegated to the stacks.

A Web site dedicated to U-T retirees carried still a fresh newsroom rumor Thursday that the paper is being sold and that the transaction with a private buyer is in escrow.

Herbert Marcuse is smiling somewhere.

FRANK GREEN is a veteran journalist and lives in the San Diego area. He can be reached at fjkbgreen@cox.net